I read somewhere once that at critical times in one’s life, the words most likely to come to one’s lips are words from prayers that one learned at a very early age.

I am inclined to endorse this observation, for I still remember the entirety of the First-ever “recitation” that was assigned to me in the first “Children’s Day” I participated in.

The words were (in my own translation from Twi): “If you eat to your fill, thank Jehovah, your God, for the good land He has given you!”

Of course, I didn’t have any “land” when I started my early schooling in 1945, but I understood the verse and always remembered, when I filled my tummy with the products of the rainforest in which I was lucky enough to be raised, that there were places where so few things could grow well that they were given names like “Sahara Desert”.

I wish all the verses I learned to read in the Bible were so inspiring. But no; there were Egyptian armies who were killed by the Red Sea (as they chased Moses and the Israelites); Philistines and other idol-worshippers who were also subjected to killings too frightful to behold. My childish mind asked, If they too were created by God, why didn’t He treat them in the way he treated the Israelites?

When I began to read the New Testament, however, I was pleased to find that God was not always on the side of the Israelites. And some of the words of Jesus were so sweet and graphic that the truth shone from them like a light shining in the darkness of the night!

On 11th July 2024, I went to Ho to take part in the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA). And to my astonishment, I found that what I wanted to tell my fellow journalists was encapsulated in a saying of Jesus: This is how I remembered the verse: “Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its savour, then of what use is it?” Or something like that!

Are journalists, like the Disciples of Jesus, truly “the salt of the earth”? I think so. Let’s look at the political history of our own country. If journalists had not engaged in a country-wide dissemination of the message of Nii Kwabena Bonne, Osu Alata Mantse, owner of the “Rolyat Castle” in Accra, who would have realized that there was a political weapon called “boycott” that could be used to force foreign merchants operating in the Gold Coast to lower the prices of the goods they sold to Ghanaians?

Who would have known what Kwame Nkrumah’s objective was, had he
not made “SELF-GOVERNMENT NOW!” the motto of his paper the ACCRA EVENING NEWS?

Who knew about the scandals in colonial Government circles before they were revealed in a journalist's column entitled “SALADIN WANTS TO KNOW!” Who told the youth of the Gold Coast that the Coussey Commission Report was “bogus and fraudulent”? Who electrified almost the whole of Gold Coast society when the BIG SIX of the UGCC were arrested and detained in 1948?

Had Ghanaian journalists been as alert in 1958 as they had been in 1948, could Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party have been able to imitate the British colonial administration and imprisoned its political opponents without trial?

When the military regime of the NLC attempted, in 1967, to sell some of Ghanaian state enterprises to foreigners who had bribed their way into becoming the “cronies” of powerful local bureaucrats, who fiercely opposed the transactions? Was it not editors working for the Government [Moses Danquah, Kodzo Dumogah, Henry Thompson, etc.] who “dared” the military Government and were sacked for doing so?

Whose comments on what was happening in Ghana so enraged the rulers of the day that they perpetrated the hitherto unheard-of crime of “shit-bombing” against the journals concerned? Who caused the deaths of Tommy Thompson and John Kugblenu? Who used the law of criminal libel to imprison some of Ghana’s bravest journalists?

Oh yes! Ghana has had journalists filled with “savoured salt!” But today, so many of those who, formerly, would light the torch of ceaseless struggle against the perpetrators of environmental murder against our sacred rivers and water bodies, report on the ravages caused by galamsey in an unconcerted, episodic manner. Media business has become, primarily, a commercial and political undertaking. Meanwhile, those who profit from such a dereliction of duty forget that their own children will, one fine day, say unto them: “You were the salt of the earth! And you willfully lost your savour. Hence, we have no good water to drink today.

“Our forest reserves are no longer sacred. Our food farms produce crops contaminated by mercury. Even our most treasured economic activity, namely, the reputation we have assiduously acquired and cultivated – as producers of the finest cocoa beans in the world – is up for grabs! And you think you are the “what” of the world?”

ANSWER ME, DAD…. AND YOU, TOO, ANSWER ME, GRANDPA!!